The long arm of Vladimir Putin

In Ukraine, as in Chechnya and Georgia beforehand, Vladimir Putin operates through warfare, using bribery, fear and force to destroy his opponents. In the West, he operates through lawfare, using politically-motivated court cases to harass and paralyse individuals in his sights.

The world has paid little attention to the Kremlin’s lawfare, but it gives a terrifying insight into how Putin has stretched the long arm of Russia’s law into Western capitals.

Over the past 15 years, as the Kremlin has become an openly revisionist power, the rule of law in Russia has taken a beating. Courts have become politicised, as have the police, prosecutors and security services. At the same time, there has been – and continues to be – significant interchange between Russian and Western law-enforcement agencies.

Key to this interchange is a series of little-known bilateral agreements – so-called Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLATs) – that define how countries co-operate on legal matters. Through these agreements, Russia has ensured the West’s complicity in the criminal cases Putin has opened against some of his regime’s opponents.

The Kremlin’s imprisonment of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, in 2003, set the template.

After Putin dismembered Khodorkovsky’s Yukos, Russia’s then-largest oil company, the Kremlin targeted assets and individuals connected to the business. Russia sent MLAT requests to a number of European countries. Authorities in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the UK refused to comply, but Swiss authorities duly obliged: Yukos’ offices were raided, in March 2004, and some of its assets were frozen. Thereafter, Switzerland aided the Kremlin’s campaign against Khodorkovsky for years to come.

The extent to which the Kremlin used MLATs in its campaign against Khodorkovsky was laid bare in a judgement made by an international tribunal based in The Hague, in July 2014.

“Starting in the summer of 2003,” the judgement stated, “the Russian Federation took a series of actions aimed at undermining the ability of the Company’s management to run the business. These included […] the numerous mutual legal assistance [sic] requests […] to affect Yukos and entities/persons associated with the Company abroad.”

Since the Yukos affair, the Kremlin has repeatedly used MLATs to lock foreign-based individuals into an ongoing, seemingly never-ending series of Kafkaesque trials.

Bill Browder, the London-based financier who was once the largest foreign investor in Russia, is one such person. After Sergey Magnitsky, a Moscow-based lawyer working for Browder, uncovered a $230 million tax fraud committed by Russian government officials, Magnitsky was arrested, imprisoned, and died in pre-trial detention, in 2009. In the years since, Browder has led a worldwide campaign to expose and punish Magnitsky’s persecutors. The result was the Magnitsky Act, passed in 2012, which imposed a US asset freeze and travel ban on a list of officials involved in Magnitsky’s mistreatment.

In retaliation, the Kremlin fabricated criminal cases against Browder and Magnitsky, and sought the assistance of Western countries in the process. In 2010, Russia requested legal assistance from the UK, in searching Browder’s London home. The UK refused. In 2013, Russia requested assistance from Sweden in arresting Browder. Swedish authorities neither declined Russia’s request nor guaranteed Browder safe passage should he travel to the country.

Although deeply troubling, this ambiguity on the part of Sweden pales into insignificance when compared to the case of Andrey Borodin, former president of the Bank of Moscow.

Over recent years, few political acts in Russia have been quite as brazen as the state-controlled VTB Group’s takeover of the Bank of Moscow, beginning in late 2010. In a few cynical moves, the Kremlin ousted Yury Luzhkov as Mayor of Moscow and orchestrated the state’s takeover of Russia’s fifth-largest bank. Along the way, Russia intimidated, pressured and brought criminal charges against those who opposed this, including Borodin.

After Borodin fled to the UK, in April 2011, the Kremlin went after him through MLATs. (He was subsequently given political asylum, in the UK, in 2013.) In 2012, assets belonging to Borodin (and his deputy, Boris Akulinin) were frozen in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. In 2013, Latvia seized Borodin’s property. At the beginning of this year, the Kremlin had opened at least five criminal cases against Borodin – each as politically motivated as the others.

The West should take a careful look what is happening here.

The fear, in Western capitals, over the last year and a half has been that Russia’s geopolitical designs on Europe stretch far beyond eastern Ukraine. Yet, rather than being designs on territory, they are designs on Western values. Or more precisely, undermining those values. In Russia’s lawfare with the West, it is lawyers, not lieutenants, that matter. MLATs were – and are – one of Russia’s most powerful weapons.

Some Western countries were quick to wake up to the threat posed by the Kremlin’s lawfare. Since the early 2000s, the UK has rejected numerous Russian MLAT requests on the basis that they were politically motivated. Indeed, many of the individuals that were the subject of those requests were subsequently given political asylum.

Other countries, however, remain relaxed about collaborating with Putin’s repressive regime. These countries argue that, by complying with Russia’s MLAT requests, they are upholding the rule of law. In truth, they are subverting it to the Kremlin’s whims.

If the West is serious about halting the growth of Russia’s aggressive kleptocracy, Western countries must refuse to help the Kremlin criminalise opponents of Putin.

Dr. Andrew Foxall is Director of the Russia Studies Centre at The Henry Jackson Society, a London-based international affairs think-tank.

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Michael Iger

Carl von Clausewitz said war is an expression of politics by other means. The new expression of other means has now to include international law and MLAT. As with ISIS and terrorism using social media, aggression is evolving rapidly today. Putin seems to have moved past the other nations in finding a new front to advance. Let’s not get bogged down in the trenches fighting the last war as he rolls over in Blitzkrieg. His dismantling of democratic principles in his country means that he will move faster and with little effective opposition from dissenters.

Posted on 5/10/15 | 11:31 PM CET

Peter Roach

Remember the other side is Hillary Clinton and Uranium One.

Posted on 5/11/15 | 1:16 AM CET

Al Horvath

Putin is simply waiting for the right moment. He is not going to be impressed by phony NATO deployments to Eastern Europe. He can take the Baltic States in 24-48 hours but he wants more. He wants to destroy NATO. He knows that the Obama administration will not honor its NATO commitments if faced with a real war and he knows that Western Europe will do nothing.

Posted on 5/11/15 | 3:16 AM CET

Betsi Rosse

We use these laws the same way. And some of Putin’s opponents are true crooks and we should honor the request.

Posted on 5/11/15 | 3:34 AM CET

presscritic

How could a midget like Putin have a long arm ?

Posted on 5/11/15 | 7:56 AM CET

Speed Franklin

I think there’s more than one thing wrong with this sentence:

“Along the way, Russia intimated, pressured and bought criminal charges against those who opposed this, including Borodin.”

intimated = intimidated? and bought = brought? a spell checker alone is not the same as a good copyeditor.

Why don’t any of these articles mention BRICS and its transformation which includes over 10 member countries? It’s a shame that Western reporters feel the need to focus on one set of facts and ignore others.